Distributed bandwidth broker for QoS multicast traffic

The differentiated services model is the emerging standard to provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) support for multimedia applications in the future Internet. This model involves bandwidth broker agents performing admission control and network configuration functionalities. A great deal of effort has been recently devoted to investigate viable approaches to the implementation of mechanisms that automatically perform the bandwidth broker functions, yet no standard policy has been proposed so far. In this paper we propose a distributed measurement-based protocol that performs admission control functionalities for multicast traffic in diff-serv networks. The protocol supports dynamic changes of the multicast group membership, operates on-demand, and supports the premium service. We prove that the proposed protocol performs an effective and efficient admission control function.